Every car needs regular maintenance checks to enable you to diagnose and fix problems early: your SAN will benefit from periodic check-ups as well. Fortunately, there’s a valuable tool that can provide a thorough health check of your entire SAN – and it’s free.
The Brocade division of Broadcom provides a SAN Health tool that provides actionable data of use to anyone who manages a SAN or consults on SAN fabrics.
In this post, I’ll cover what SAN Health is, who should use it, and what benefits they will see from adding SAN Health to their storage networking tool kit. In a future post, I’ll provide practical suggestions on how to run SAN Health, and which of the many SAN Health reports an admin or consultant should focus on first.
Michael Peppers is a technical marketing engineer (TME) with a focus on SAN, FlexArray/V-Series, QoS, FLI, and NVMe in ONTAP. His TME mission is to broaden and deepen the SAN, FlexArray & related knowledge of customers, partners, and coworkers, and increase the scope of NetApp's SAN & FlexArray solutions. Prior to becoming a TME Mike tested ONTAP SAN Interoperability in engineering quality assurance, before that, was an Escalations Engineer in the NetApp Technical Support Center. Before joining NetApp in 2005, Mike was a Networking and Systems administrator for several of US-based corporations.